Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20th, 1854, in Charleville, a commune in northern France. His father, Frédéric Rimbaud, was an army captain, and his mother, Marie-Cathérine-Vitalie Rimbaud, was a local farmer’s daughter. He had an older brother, Frédéric, who was a year older than him, and two younger sisters, Vitalie, born in 1858, and Isabelle, born in 1860. 

Rimbaud’s father, though he was an easy-going, pleasant man, was rarely home. He always had to take trips to the northeast of France for various military postings. When Rimbaud was 5, he left the household for good – he joined the regiment and never returned. The abandonment scarred Rimbaud and permeates in his poetry.

Rimbaud’s mother took the abandonment harshly too. She assumed an involved role in the children’s lives, imposing a strict Catholic education. She was stubborn, bigoted, authoritarian, and narrow-minded. She feared that her children would follow in her husband’s footsteps. Her punishments were frequent and cruel – she would make them go without meals or memorize 100 lines of Latin verse, to the point that Rimbaud wrote a 700-word essay on how much he hated learning Latin at the age of 9.

His mother represented all the values he would come to reject: conventional religious faith, hard work, patriotism, and social snobbery. 

Rimbaud excelled in school. He surprised teachers and was considered a model student and child prodigy, especially in his literature classes. He won 14 French academic competitions in his first two years at school, one of which was a prize for Religious Education. The irony is apparent – after school he would write blasphemous phrases on the walls of local buildings. He showed a talent for writing verse in Latin  – his mother probably thought her choice of punishment was paying off! – and in 1869 he wrote a Latin poem that won him first place at Concours Académique. 

His first known French poem was “Les Étrennes des Orphelins” or “The Orphans’ New Year Gifts,” and it appeared in the cultural magazine La Revue Pour Tous in January 1870.

“You feel, in all this, that something is missing…

–Is there no mother for these small children,

No mother with a fresh smile and triumphant glances?

So she forgot, in the evening, alone and leaning down, 

To kindle a flame saved from the ashes,

And to pile over them the wool and the quilt

Before leaving them, and calling out to them: forgive me!”

Rimbaud was 15 years old when he wrote this poem. The entire poem has five parts and is a gothic story about recently orphaned children who dream of their family still being intact and how they want to give New Year’s gifts to their dead mother in their dreams. 

“There are no parents, no hearth, no stolen keys:

And therefore no kisses, no sweet surprises!

Ah! how sad New Year’s Day will be for them!

–And pensively, while from their big blue eyes

A bitter tear silently drops,

They murmur: ‘When will our mother return?’”

One teacher at the Collège de Charleville was especially dear to Rimbaud. In late January of 1870, 22-year-old Georges Izambard was hired as a new rhetoric teacher. Izambard became Rimbaud’s mentor, and they developed a close relationship, with Rimbaud looking up to Izambard as the father figure he never had Rimbaud’s mother did not approve – she thought Izambard was corrupting Rimbaud’s moral character. Nevertheless, the two remained close even after he graduated through regular letters, which today provide insight into Rimbaud’s inner personal thoughts that he only felt safe sharing with Izambard.

On July 19th, 1870, the Franco-Prussian War began. The Collège de Charleville was closed down and turned into a military hospital for the war, marking the end of Rimbaud’s formal education. Izambard, now unemployed, left Charleville to live with his aunts in Douai. 

“TO GEORGES IZAMBARD

Charleville, August 25, 1870

Monsieur,

You are lucky not to be living now in Charleville. My native town is the supremely stupid provincial town.”

Rimbaud complained about the lack of books – the only thing he could read was the Courrier des Ardennes, a substandard newspaper that was owned, run, directed, edited-in-chief and edited-at-all by a certain Mr. A. Pouillard. He is grateful to at least have the books that he borrowed from Izambard – Le Diable à Paris, Costal l’Indien, La Robe de Nessus, Les Epreuves, Les Glaneuses, and Don Quichotte – but he had long finished reading those, and even had to reread some, and at present he was left with nothing new to read. 

He dreamed of a lavish life in Paris, complete with sunbaths, endless walks, rest, travel, adventure, bohemianism, newspapers, and books. Instead, he was confined to Charleville, a small, unknown town next to Mézières, an even smaller and even more unknown town, lamenting at what his life has become. All he wanted to do was leave.

The Franco-Prussian War had made the town even more insufferable. Grocers, notaries, glaziers, tax inspectors, woodworkers, and all other middle-class workers held rifles close to their hearts, which he thought was a pitiful and dreadful “shivering show of patriotism.” 

“I prefer them seated.” He thought they were ridiculous – here were his self-righteous neighbors, gesticulating like “Prudhommesque swordsmen,” a word that translates to “of a pompous and ridiculous banality.” In this letter to Izambard, he sends verses from poems and asks for a 25-page letter in return. He promises revelations about the life he dreams of.

And we see that he wasn’t lying about his desire to leave. On August 29th, four days after writing this letter, Rimbaud attempted to flee to Paris. But he didn’t make it far. He was arrested when he disembarked at the Gare du Nord and held in the Paris municipal jail. Rimbaud wrote a letter to Izambard from Mazas, the Paris prison on Diderot boulevard to which he was transferred, begging for his help in being released.

“TO GEORGES IZAMBARD

Paris, September 5, 1870

Cher Monsieur,

What you advised me not to do, I did. I went to Paris and left my mother’s home. I took this trip August 29. 

Arrested as I got off the train, for not having a centime and owing the railroad thirteen francs, I was taken to the prefecture, and today am awaiting the verdict in Mazas! – Oh! My hope is in you as in my mother. You have always been a brother to me and now I am asking for the help you offered me. I have written to my mother, to the imperial procurator, to the head of the police in Charleville. If you hear nothing from me on Wednesday, before the train that leaves Douai for Paris, take that train, come here to claim me by letter, or go to the procurator to intercede, to vouch for me and pay my debt! […] Do all this! I love you as a brother, I will love you as a father. 

I shake your hand.

Your poor,

Arthur Rimbaud at Mazas.

And if you succeed in freeing me, you will take me with you to Douai.”

Rimbaud was desperate to get out of prison. He pleaded with Izambard to provide money for the bail and take him to Izambard’s home in Douai. And for a few happy days he did stay at Izambard’s house in Douai, talking literature and being spoiled by Izambard’s sisters. But his mother sent for him and he returned home.

Aside from Rimbaud’s request, this letter is telling of Rimbaud’s relationship to Izambard. He claims to love Izambard like a brother, like a father, even. This was Rimbaud’s way of finding the familial comfort he never felt at home.

Of course, even after he returned home, the only thing he could think of was leaving again.

“TO GEORGES IZAMBARD

Charleville, November 2, 1870

[…] I am dying, I am decomposing in dullness, in paltry wickedness, in grayness. What can I say? –in a terrible way I insist on worshipping free freedom, and so many things that I am to be pitied, isn’t it true?”

In this letter Rimbaud expresses more of the same – an utter discontent and disgust for his life. Great things were happening in the world, and he was taking no part in them. The exemplary 15-going-on-16 year old schoolboy was letting his hair grow long, smoking his clay pipe, and mocking the bourgeoisie. The poems he wrote resonated this yearning to break away. 

The combination of adolescent rebellion and poetic precocity yielded, in May, 1871, a grand declaration of artistic purpose. He was developing a poetic style and developing his theory of voyance, which he expressed as a visionary method in which the poetic process became a tool for exploration of other realities. This theory is expressed in his letters to George Izambard and Paul Demeny, another poet and friend.

“To Georges Izambard

Charleville, 13 May 1871

[…] I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a Seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet.”

He continues to explore this idea in his letter to Paul Demeny.

“To Paul Demeny

Charleville, 15 May 1871

[…] The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! […]

I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. 

The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed – and the supreme Scholar! – Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. […]

Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire. […]

This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time in the universal soul […] Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by all, he would really be a multiplier of progress.”

He was only 15 years old when he wrote this, and yet he seems to have a better understanding of what being a poet means than hundreds of others. This philosophy became a sort of personal manifesto, a creed by which he would live the rest of his poet years.

He believed that poets had to search their soul for the fountain of self-knowledge that inspires all creative works. It was from there that they could cultivate this magic and turn it into poetry. To be a seer, you had to discover yourself and disorient yourself from all senses and emotions. You must purge everything unnecessary and keep the essentials. The result would be that the senses became indistinguishable – similar to synesthesia, each sensation would trigger another and produce the ultimate sensory experience. He admitted that he was wholeheartedly working to become a seer. 

In this letter, Rimbaud also issues a prophecy of a time when women will have the choice to pursue an education and a poetic career and not be confined to domestic roles. He realized this during a time when women had no access to a formal education. While he was freely discovering poetry, Emily Dickinson would seek the little freedom she had in her bedroom and write hundreds of poems without hope of publishing them.

“These poets will exist. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man – heretofore abominable – having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? – She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.”

Rimbaud’s state of mind is best represented in his poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ (‘Le Bateau ivre’). Written at the age of 16, this poem uses the metaphor of a boat to symbolically represent his tumultuous youth and state of mind.

“Now I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves,
Thrown by the storm into the birdless air,
I whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued
By the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats; 

[…]

But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor.
O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!”

The poem is famous for its dizzying imagery and its linguistic creativity. The poem is written in twenty-five rhymed quatrains of alexandrines, a classic French six-beat line, which is a format that was considered formal and correct. This stands in stark contrast to the subject of the poem – a drunken boat in a fantasy world. The vessel has lost its haulers, its rudder, its anchor, and is simply wandering, led by the waves. Each stanza tries to hang on to the last, pulling you further into Rimbaud’s increasingly fantastical world. Its chaos seems to be a metaphor for the chaos that is inherent to art, poetry, and life.

“The wash of the green water on my shell of pine,
Sweeter than apples to a child its pungent edge;
It cleansed me of the stains of vomits and blue wine
And carried off with it the rudder and the kedge.”

Here, the two facets of Rimbaud’s character are in a struggle – yin and yang, the charming and the destructive – they meld and implode and leave Rimbaud gasping for air. It is definitely a difficult poem to decipher, and that’s part of the appeal. Critics and writers around the world grapple with this poem, a poem that a 16 year old wrote.

His poem ‘Vowels’ (‘Voyelles’) also represents his desire to discover a new language with which to create groundbreaking poetry.

“A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
One day I will tell your latent birth:
A, black hairy corset of shining flies
Which buzz around cruel stench,

Gulfs of darkness; E, whiteness of vapor and tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers;
I, purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips
In anger or penitent drunkenness;

U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,”

He assigns color to each vowel – A is black, E is white, I is red, O is blue, U is green – each sound and letter having its own association, its own mood. The way Rimbaud understood it, each part of the language had a world of meaning, and he wanted, as a poet, to challenge the traditional use of language and stretch language to its breaking point.

It was also in 1871 that Rimbaud first got in touch with Paul Verlaine, a 27 year old poet living in Paris. Verlaine liked his writing and invited him to Paris, even offering to pay his travel expenses. Of course Rimbaud, who had been complaining about Charleville for most of his life, was eager to accept. 

As the critic Daniel Mendelsohn puts it, “The rules of poetry weren’t the only things that Rimbaud broke when he arrived in Paris. Among other things – bric-a-brac, dishes, and furniture in the various homes where he was offered hospitality, and where his boorish behavior inevitably led to his eviction – he broke up Verlaine’s marriage.” The two men became lovers almost as soon as Rimbaud arrived, and their affair shocked Paris. 

For the next year and a half, their relationship persisted. Verlaine left his wife and newborn child to devote himself to Rimbaud. They were seen in cafes, poetry gatherings, and on trips around Brussels and London. Newspapers would mock and gossip about them. They were striking – they engaged in public displays of affection and overindulged in a variety of substances and wrote explicit poetry about each other. Critics described them as “the Adam and Eve of modern homosexuality.” He definitely preferred this to his years spent rotting in Charleville, as he expresses in his poem ‘May Banners’ (‘Bannières de Mai’). 

“To be patient and to be bored
Are too simple. Fie on my cares.
I want dramatic summer
To bind me to its chariot of fortune.”

Unfortunately, many believe that Rimbaud viewed his relationship with Verlaine as an experiment for his development as a poet. He was unemotional and would often make cruel jokes about Verlaine’s appearance. This unexpected relationship seemed to be yet another step Rimbaud considered necessary in his journey of discovery of love, society, and art.

As the relationship progressed, the two were living impoverished in London, putting out desperate ads as French tutors. Their relationship was increasingly strained. This period of Rimbaud’s life was reflected in the drastic evolution of his poetry.

In the collection of poems called Festivals of Patience, Rimbaud writes ‘Song of the Highest Tower’ (‘Chanson de la plus haute tour’). 

“Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I wasted my life.
Ah! Let the time come
When hearts fall in love.” 

His third poem is ‘Eternity’ (‘L’Eternité’).

“It has been found again.
What has? – Eternity.
It is the sea gone off
With the sun.”

In this specific collection of poetry, his poems are stripped of superfluous descriptions, and he seems to be influenced by the simple lyrics of eighteenth-century operas.

After a dramatic argument, Verlaine ran to Belgium, leaving Rimbaud poor and alone. Rimbaud chased him to Brussels. There, on July 10th, 1873, Verlaine, who was distraught and drunk and threatening suicide, used a revolver that he had intended for himself to shoot Rimbaud in the hand.

Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison. Charles Dantzig, a French author, satirically describes the situation: “our anarchist called the police.” Rimbaud returned home chastened to his parent’s farm in Charleville and wrote his masterpiece A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer).

“Long ago, if my memory serves me, my life was a banquet where everyone’s heart was generous, and where all wines flowed.”

A Season in Hell is a highly confessional work and a journey of self-discovery. When Rimbaud’s mother asked him the meaning of the work, he simply responded, “It means what it says, literally and in every sense.”

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.” 

The prose is raw with emotion – at 18 years old, Rimbaud was a tempest that wrote in language mature beyond his age, and he stood self-aware amidst the rage and confusion bubbling inside of him. He pushed language “to the point of disintegration.” He reached several conclusions, one of which is that he was born inferior (“I have always been of substandard stock.”)

“But is there not real torture in the fact that, since the declaration of science, and Christianity, man deludes himself, proving obvious truth, puffing up with the pleasure of repeating his proofs, and living only in this way.”

Ultimately, A Season in Hell is an evocation of a man who struggled but has ultimately come to terms with the limits of the self. He bids farewell to literature and poetry. The weight of failure, regret, and missed opportunity is crushing.

“I who called myself angel or seer, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the soil with a duty to seek and rough reality to embrace!” 

He has come back to reality, in a sense. It’s tragic, too – he lost faith in the potential he could reach. He dreamed of stretching language and humanity and the soul to its breaking point, he yearned to discover new dimensions of art and life and love. And as he entered his 20s, he was faced with a sense of hopelessness – he was maturing, and the things he used to believe were now simply childish idealizations. 

The last line: “One must be absolutely modern.”

He wrote A Season in Hell between April and August of 1873. He persuaded his mother to pay to have it published in Brussels in 1873. Over the next two years, he may have written some of the poems in his poetry collection Illuminations (Les Illuminations). This was his last collection that he wrote. 

Illuminations begins in the calm after the storm that was A Season in Hell. Many of the phrases are uncanny and incomprehensible, leaving the reader in a state of bewilderment. Rimbaud does this on purpose – he uses the finale of the sections to taunt and confuse readers.

“He knew us all and loved us. May we, this winter night, from cape to cape, from the noisy pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from vision to vision, our strength and our feelings tired, hail him and see him and send him away, and under tides and on the summit of snow deserts follow his eyes, his breathing, his body, his day.” 

This final section, ‘Génie,’ describes a Christlike figure, and is, on a deeper level, Rimbaud’s description of ideal love. The rhythm is incantatory and haunting and intense. It feels like a dream, a dizzying jumble of images and realizations that the author, like Rimbaud, is forced to sort through and make sense of. He leads us through several recurring themes – discovery, childhood, revolution, a new poetry, liberation, and unencumbered expression.

This was some of the last poetry Rimbaud ever wrote. He was 21 years old.

Rimbaud was, by many standards, a genius. He remains one of the greats, despite the fact that his career only lasted five years. 

Perhaps he found that, as he grew up, he had nothing left to say. The fire within him, that burned so strongly in his teenage years, waned and extinguished. 

He was in a constant state of rebellion – against school, against his mother, against society, against war, against convention, against poetry. But that sense of urgency and contrariness and rebellion was weathered by time. He became what he feared – a man who decomposed into dullness.

His entire life he longed for the impossible, and he wandered Europe and his soul trying to find it. But no matter how peripatetic he was, he had no success. He slowed to a stop. He completely abandoned his career as a writer. As Mendelsohn puts it, “The apparently irreconcilable extremes of his thought and behavior are easier to account for when you remember that Rimbaud the poet never reached adulthood: violent oscillations between yearning and contempt, sentimentality, and viciousness, are not unheard of in adolescents.”

Of course, in classic Rimbaud style, he drastically changed the course of the rest of his life. After quitting poetry, he studied Italian, Spanish and began touring Europe, often on foot, looking for adventure and income. 

In May 1876, he enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army, with the intention of getting free passage to Java (Indonesia, today) in the Dutch East Indies. After a few months, he deserted the army, risking execution, and fled the jungle, returning to France by ship. He settled in Vienna. He traveled to Egypt, Java, and Cyprus, where he worked unexpected jobs, such as working in a traveling circus or being the foreman of a construction gang in the mountains. In 1880 he worked in Ethiopia as the representative of a French coffee trader based in what is today Yemen.

In February 1891, at the age of 36, Rimbaud developed a tumor in his right knee. He was forced to return to France for treatment, where his leg was amputated in a Marseille hospital. 

He came home to his parents’ farm to recover, but his health continued to deteriorate. He returned to the hospital in Marseille, where he was diagnosed with cancer.

He died in the hospital on November 10th, 1891, with only his younger sister Isabelle by his side. In the final moments before death, he accepted the Catholic faith. 

Rimbaud was no ordinary poet. The spirit of revolt burned inside him, burned bright in his adolescent years. His story is beautiful and tragic. French poet Stéphane Mallarmé described Rimbaud as a “meteor, lit by no other reason than his presence, arising alone then vanishing.” Like a meteor, he shone bright and fast and, just as quickly, extinguished. The imprint he left on poetry and his contributions to the modernist, symbolist, dadaist, and surrealist movements are undeniable. His messages and spirit stretched into the twentieth century, serving as an inspiration to many, particularly the Situationists of the 1960s and the punk subculture of the 1970s.

As Rimbaud asserts, “I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” And for that, he’ll be remembered for years to come.

As critic Daniel Mendelsohn puts it, “The apparently irreconcilable extremes of his thought and behavior are easier to account for when you remember that Rimbaud the poet never reached adulthood: violent oscillations between yearning and contempt, sentimentality, and viciousness, are not unheard of in adolescents.”